


Waiting Around

by Anam_Writes



Series: princes love dragons; it's just a fact [11]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, First Love, No Beta; We Die Like Glenn, Pining, time skip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:35:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26208025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anam_Writes/pseuds/Anam_Writes
Summary: Claude waits....He has to stand, he reminds himself.Just keep marching. Keep smiling. He’d said that - or something like that - just hours ago, straight to her face. The particulars didn’t matter. He’d said it. And had he meant it?
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Series: princes love dragons; it's just a fact [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1610308
Comments: 19
Kudos: 95





	Waiting Around

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this in 2 hrs on no sleep and lots of caffeine.

He has to stand, he reminds himself. He has to stand. 

Just keep marching. Keep smiling. He’d said that - or something like that - just hours ago, straight to her face. The particulars didn’t matter. He’d said it. And had he meant it? Had his words carried truth, sincerity enough to reach her? Or had he lied, spat void speech like venom at her feet the last time they spoke?

When last they spoke, he tells himself. Not when they last spoke. That could be misconstrued, twisted. That could mean - 

Claude looked out over the mass of civilians, all huddled together and praying. 

What could that mean?

…

The dead pile up. He’s in Derdriu but he still feels the weight of every person found in the rubble miles off. 

The Emperor’s allowed Leicester to dig. Being neither the Church or having Holy as a prefix in their name helped with the persuasion. His letter helped more, he thought. It had seemed a fruitless attempt when Oswald sent demands to collect their dead. Claude found more success. 

He knew she was tender somewhere in there. 

No word comes of Byleth, of his friend. She is not amidst the recognizable, so she may be with those mangled. A loyal flyer - one of the Immortal Corps newly answerable to him from - makes a report. 

“The pyre’s were not so tall nor so wide as I’ve seen before,” he says. “Whoever led the retreat succeeded in minimizing casualties to building collapse. Most losses are accounted for.”

She led the retreat. He’d seen her do it. She was annoyingly competent at that too, it would seem.

She is not among those dead they can identify. With so few they cannot, it is a statistical improbability she is among the charred or mangled either. Byleth remains unaccounted for. Claude waits. 

…

Oswald was old. Oswald was distant. 

Claude finds himself grieving that he could not grieve more, or better, for the father of his mother. He sends her word across the border. She almost think to come, to see him buried. But Tiana meant what she said; she had no desire to step foot on that cursed continent again. 

Claude reads from his favourite proverbs instead. 

Something about deer, about guardians, about flowers and stars. Claude comes to realize the verse is rather pretty. He and Oswald shared a certain sensitivity and a talent at hiding it. 

Claude grieves more. He’d never really get to be grandson, would he?

Claude ventures, a moment, to think that the man was lonely. Then he walks by the graves one day and sees the name Godfrey to his left, Millicent to his right. 

Claude wonders who he might be buried with. That he has to think so long, so hard on the matter tells him that he was the lonelier of the two. 

Claude doesn’t drink often, but he thinks he needs one. 

…

He thinks about what she might be doing. Wherever she is, he has no doubt she’s in a bind. She’d have come to him otherwise, no doubt - 

(But there is. There is doubt, nipping like cold at his skin, biting like frost. Steel as he gaze it pierces. She may fight for coin somewhere. She might have turned her allegiance another direction. She may have died in the mean time - between then and now - and he’d been too focused shuffling through rubble in the wrong places. She may have settled far from the war, found a spouse, a good dog, had a nice kid. She may be teaching them to fish and have forgotten somewhere out there he was fighting for Fodlan and searching for her. She may have forgotten their wish.) 

So he waits. He waits with faith. But faith is not something that comes naturally to him. It is something that grew against all odds with her light to guide it. It was something she earned from him - half sent off with her and half kept here with him. It was something that required careful tending and maintenance to thrive. He put the work in for it to thrive, even when Judith thought he was mad for it or Nader tried to herd him away. 

It grew stronger with tending, he noted. He stopped doubting so much as the weeks, the months, the years passed. When he imagined her it was against the dawn, back turned to him, waiting on his call. Or she ascended a flight of stairs to him, reaching out for his offered hand to gaze at the stars together. 

One time he thought of her it was a memory of her smile, then of a rare blush. He thought how pretty that pink of her cheeks would look against an ivory veil, held up in a crown of her favourite lilies. 

He thought such boyish fantasy had died with peace. When the image came, uncalled, to prove that theory wrong, Claude smiled. It was nice to know something as fragile and innocent as first love from a time before had made it so long unscathed. 

… 

Claude packed a lunch for two. He wrapped it all up in brown paper parcels, tied it off in string. He kept them in his saddle bag and thanked himself for the foresight when she dug in. He’d anticipated the kind of hunger that came with travel, not with half a decade’s sleep. Still, it helped. He was glad for it. 

They sat on collapsed stone by the crushed alters in the cathedral. Byleth was always short - at least from where he was standing - and her legs kicked. Her heels tapped in rhythm on the stone she was perched on. The toe of his boot met the beat. It was a little dance to a song no one was playing. 

“Things are hectic now,” he says. “Too hectic to celebrate a reunion the way I’d like. This will more than do though, for now.”

“This?” Byleth blinks and takes a bite. 

Once she’d have zeroed in on the more suspicious promise under ‘for now.’

“A little feast for two,” he says. 

“A private feast with the Duke of Leicester,” she hums. “Lucky me.”

“You know how I feel about luck,” he scoffs. “Luck’s got nothing to do with it. We’re running on fate here, the kind you forge like a chain link, bonds of friendship and all that.”

“You sound like a cliche,” Byleth smiles.

“This cliche spent five years waiting around for you,” he reminds her. “And met you in a dilapidated, enemy infested monastery. And made you a very nice sandwich.”

“I never said that was bad,” Byleth shrugged. “Just more honest.”

Claude’s brow raised. “You think so?”

“Yeah,” Byleth said. “It’s nice to hear you admit you like fate and friendship.”

“Not just that,” he winks. “Poetry and true love, too.”

“Huh,” Byleth’s legs kick. “You really are a cliche. Now you just need to be a knight on a white stead.”

She had no idea. 

He has to stand, he reminds himself. He has to stand. There’s work to be done outside these four walls and work to do in them too. 

“Phew! I am stuffed,” he announces. “Just waiting around sounds boring, so why don’t we get some exercise in. You know, help with digestion and stuff.”

Claude found himself more eager to stand than he had been before.


End file.
